


Strike the Water of the Nile

by Marie_L



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Comfort/Angst, Community: apocalyptothon, Explicit Language, F/M, Plague, Red Shirt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-01
Updated: 2014-09-01
Packaged: 2018-02-14 07:02:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2182368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Marie_L/pseuds/Marie_L
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Uhura and McCoy are trapped on a planet of the dying, racing to find a cure that will save the rest of the planet and themselves.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Strike the Water of the Nile

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Knowmefirst](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Knowmefirst/gifts).



McCoy should have known it was going to be a shitty trip when the nav unit cut out mid-flight. The shuttle shook and dove down about 1000 meters over the course of seconds, sucking what little was left in his stomach straight up to his throat, held in check only by a nausea-battling epinephrine surge. _Flying._ The only fucking thing worse was beaming one's atoms across the damnable sky.

"Woo-hoo!" bellowed one irrationally perky Ensign Chiang from the piloting seat. "Now there's a little excitement for us on this fine morning. Right?" His hands deftly flew across the control panel, manually stabilizing the small ship and bringing it adrift above their target city.

"Just to let you know, I hate you," bemoaned McCoy. Chiang just grinned and waved without looking back. The doctor's disposition for all things floating transport was famous, and even the Captain had taken the time to warn the young pilot about his likely grouchy demeanor. Chiang was unfazed though, and next to him in the passenger hold, Uhura too rolled her eyes.

"That was a wimpy two-gee drop. How did you ever make it through the Academy?" she asked sarcastically.

"I'm a doctor, Lieutenant. I stay in sick bay and poke and prod and cure people. I don't need to swashbuckle myself through the atmosphere of every damn colorful planet that comes our way."

"Except, of course, when you do."

They were headed down to Klpskacki'is -- or, as the Bones thought of it and Starfleet's charts put it, Alhena Four -- on a short-lived humanitarian mission. A minor plague, they said, but one with unusual virulence. Could the advanced, mighty Federation lend a hand? Truthfully it was the sort of planet McCoy had deep misgivings about, even as he felt obligated as a physician to aid people that were suffering. They were barely into the warp era, mere decades beyond the cutoff for the Prime Directive, and still in the bloodthirsty stage of cultural development where the Klps kept trying to dominate their own. Exactly where humans were 150 years ago, just a couple of generations after the cultural shock of _we are not alone_ ricocheted through the populous. Also still at the begging stage, where acquiring shiny new tech from other species held an allure far greater than the tough work of developing everything yourself.

Nevertheless, here they were, ready with their shiny beeping tech. The shuttle had been outfitted with a the latest in microbiology analytics -- some machines straight from the lab adjacent to sickbay, so Bones hoped they made it off the planet in one piece. Uhura had volunteered to translate, a small favor that McCoy was grateful for, even as he sporadically grumbled at her. The rough Universal Translators were inferior in every way to a live human being, and the doctor may have to deal with some very agitated and stressed individuals. No time for translation cock-ups.

Chiang brought the shuttle to a hover above what appeared to be a tent city on the western edge of a large city. The disease had broken out right in the capital, so containment was a major problem. That end really wasn't McCoy's problem; he was here to find an appropriate anti-viral for treatment, or barring that, a vaccine for the uninfected population. Manufacture and distribution was a local matter, for the Enterprise couldn't dilly-dally over one minor incident on a minor planet. The primitive RNA sequence sent up in advance didn't look too difficult to manage, so McCoy didn't expect to be down here more than three days, tops.

The shuttle came a rest in a dusty clearing between white tents, and Uhura launched herself out of her seat to take a preliminary look out the front window. She clasped McCoy's shoulder as she rushed by. "Hey, doc, we're on the ground now. You can open your eyes again."

"Let me just push my diaphragm back down near my gut, and I'll get back to you."

She laughed and turned to assess the situation before opening the bay doors."This seems to be a pretty big refugee area, but ... I don't see anybody. Where's the welcome wagon?"

Now Bones _did_ drag himself up to look at the scan readings. "Life signs?" he asked, a vague sense of unease settling into his already-roiled stomach.

"Over twelve thousand in the immediate vicinity."

"Huh. Well, maybe everyone is inside for lunch or something. The virus spreads via touch and exposure to bodily fluids, so everybody double-glove up. We'll take the face masks just in case there's some aerosolized particles in the tents, but we probably don't need them for the meet-n-greet. Don't want to terrify the locals."

The three of them geared and grabbed their packs. Chiang was just about to crack the doors when a figure in a full decontamination suit came lumbering up to the front of the shuttle, waving his arms sluggishly. McCoy launched himself at Chiang's hand over the controls. "WAIT! Don't ..."

Too late, Chiang hit the button. The capsule doors cracked open, and the air from an alien world rushed inside. The climate was hot, sticky, oppressive. McCoy hurriedly flipped open a tricorder to take a reading. Sure enough, the virus was present in the atmospheric sample. The plague was airborne, and they were all contaminated. Uhura behind him began to swear in half a dozen languages.

Bones rushed up to the whomever it was in the suit, jabbing a gloved finger at his chest. "Why _the fuck_ didn't you radio ahead that this thing had gone airborne?! Be sure to translate 'fuck', Lieutenant."

Before Uhura could get any words out, the alien in the suit tried to speak. It came out only as hissing, wheezing air. He clawed at his own throat, his arms moving slowly with occasional jerks, until he collapsed onto the ground, frozen with his hands on his neck. McCoy leaned over his prostrate form the medcorder. "He's not dead yet, but soon will be. The virus is disrupting motoneurons in the skeletal muscles. Soon he will no longer be able to breath." He got up and rummaged through one of the packs, and snapped a vial into an injector. "Both of you, come here. I hope this will slow replication of the virus in our nervous systems. Now we really have motivation to find a cure."

"Sir, the Captain is hailing us for a update. What should I tell him?"

"Tell Jim that we've been infected, and we are under quarantine. Level I emergency, Protocol 2A. Shut the whole goddamn planet down."

 

******

 

They set up camp in a nearby tent, filled with obsolete but vital equipment. Every person they encountered had been infected, every one showed signs of catalepsy and was unable to speak. The virus was able to live for several days in warm humid air without a host, enabling its spread throughout the region before the Klps even knew it had gone airborne. Overnight, the population began to fall. McCoy estimated they had only a day or two before it began to affect them, too.

Kirk was able to beam down some neurostimulants that would be helpful when symptoms appeared, but otherwise they were on their own. Enterprise had her own ethical problems to deal with: Dozens of ships from the opposite side of the globe, having been alerted to the rapidly spreading plague, were attempting to take off in their rickety warp-one vessels and flee the system. Kirk couldn't let them leave of course, but didn't have the cold-bloodedness to fire on a bunch of desperate civilians either. He kept them in limbo with threats and enticements, floating in orbit of their own homeworld.

Down on Klpskacki'is it could have been chaos, but instead an eerie stillness reigned. Stiffened bodies were everywhere; there was very little that visually distinguished the dying from the dead. Planetary officials were enforcing a vast quarantine over the entire region, so nothing and no one was moving in and out. Uhura and Chiang spent much of the first day running around with antivirals hypos trying to identify survivors that might conceivably last long enough for a cure, but there were none. Every last person in the camp -- and quite possibly now in the massive city beyond -- had breathed the lethal air, and every one of them eventually suffered irreparable damage to either their hearts or diaphragms.

Well after sunset, Uhura came around to pester McCoy. "You've gotta eat, doc." She proffered some emergency rations they had stored on the shuttle.

"Fine, fine, leave it and I'll get to it." He had successfully sequenced the bug and identified the dual mutations that allowed it to float on water droplets in the misty air. Unfortunately that hadn't opened up any obvious sites of attack for the virus once it had infected its victim, although Bones thought he could come up with a vaccine compatible with the Klps immune system in short order.

"You're not going to do anyone any good by weakening yourself and hastening the virus's spread. Come on, eat with us. Five minutes."

McCoy glanced up at her, fully intending to get annoyed at the nagging. But then he saw her face, full of genuine concern for his well-being. "All right," he said, swiping the dehydrated bar, "...five minutes. But then I could use your help setting up these in vitro cultures. Pretty sure one will show promise as a vaccine."

"Will that help us?" she asked softly.

He looked straight in her somber eyes, and realized she already knew the answer. "No. But we can save the uninfected in the cooler regions of the planet." She nodded and motioned him over for their brief meal.

 

******

 

On the morning of the second day, Chiang woke up unable to move his neck or the muscles in his face. He still had mobility in his limbs, but the infection was spreading fast down the cranial nerves into the rest of his peripheral nervous system. None of the Klps they had seen had survived long once this stage of infection was reached. In a fit of desperation McCoy injected him with the best of the prospective vaccines, despite the fact that it wasn't optimized for human T-cells. Chiang's neck swelled up from a massive immune system overreaction, and, despite an emergency trach and an arsenal of antihistamines and immune suppressants, he died.

They wrapped his body in a stasis blanket and stored it on the shuttle, and went right back to the grim work. No time to grieve, no time to mourn the injustice of a young man on his first deep space mission randomly drawing the short straw to pilot the Shuttle of Death.

McCoy injected them with every antiviral they had, but the two survivors themselves were starting to show symptoms. Some part of his brain insisted on identifying and categorizing the cruel signs of decay. _Myasthenia_ _of the_ _splenius capitis,_ thought Bones. Weakness in the neck. Then it became increasingly difficult to focus the eyes through an endless series of uncontrolled jerks: _At_ _axia_ _of the extraocular muscles._ Eating, on the brief occasions they stopped to eat, felt like chewing and swallowing gluey clay, for their tongues and muscles in the esophogus were slowly ceasing to cooperate. _Dysarthria and_ _dysphagia._ Uhura's beautiful face started to sag on one side, lending the impression of a stroke. _At_ _onia_ _of zygomaticus major_. They began to communicate via typing on padds, because their pronunciation of words slurred so badly. _Lingual atrophy._

By the end of the day, though, McCoy thought he had identified three good vaccine candidates. The information was transmitted to Enterprise and from there a grateful Science Institute on the other side of the panicked planet, for modeling, manufacture and animal testing. By mutual consent, only then did they turn their attention to themselves. Bones thought a particular protein on the surface of the virus could be a target for a synthetic drug, but even his brain wasn't responding as usual, so he had to send up to his assistant on Enterprise to double check his work. _Mental sluggishness._

At three am, while McCoy prepared to inject himself with his fourth round of stims and power through his second night without sleep, Uhura took the hypo out of his hands and led him to a pile of blankets she had laid out in a corner. Even at night it was hot as a furnace, so they didn't cover themselves, but simply curled up in each others' arms for a night of gentle contact, while they could still feel it. They both fell asleep almost instantly.

The next morning, the third day, neither one of them could speak. Uhura looked as if her throat had been cut. Her voice wasn't only the root of her profession as a linguist, but her heart as well. Bones knew, from some rumor on the grapevine -- might have even been Jim -- that her singing was straight from an angelic choir. He wished he had asked her to sing on that first day, when they already knew they were doomed. He stroked her damaged face with the back of his hand, but she couldn't feel it. _Peripheral paresthesia._

He retrieved a nearby padd and tapped out with clumsy fingers, _keep going_ _testing_

She responded, _how long?_

_h_ _ours_

Uhura nodded and pulled them to their feet.

 

******

 

Unsurprisingly given their mental atrophy, Bones wasn't the one to save them. The credit went to his assistant back on Enterprise, who had taken his data on the target protein site and synthed four slightly different antivirals keyed to lock onto that protein. McCoy didn't even read the notes of what was in the box when it beamed down at their feet; he immediately took whatever was in there and injected them with all four samples. He was mindful of what had happened to Chiang but their breathing was becoming labored, so they were soon dead anyway.

They didn't die, but it took over an hour of gasping before either one of them saw any improvement. Breathing felt like trying to move their lungs through a cement wall. The two officers sat crosslegged on the floor, holding each others' hands, staring at each other and willing their partner to take another breath. _One more, just one more._ And another, and another after that, until the hour finally came that it no longer took conscious effort.

For the second night in a row they lay with limbs entangled, but this time neither one of them could sleep. It was too terrifying that one of them might stop breathing, so they rested with their hands on each others' chests, feeling the telltale movement of life.

 _we'll live?_ she typed the next morning.

 _chance in hell now_ he replied, and she laughed. It came out as a grotesque croaking sound, but it was _something,_ her voice box was unfreezing, so she laughed with joy again.

 

******

 

By the fifth day they couldn't take the stench of the camp anymore, so Uhura flew the shuttle a short distance outside the deadly refugee zone, but still within the quarantine. Chiang's body had been beamed straight into a sealed burial tube, but they were probably going to miss the funeral. Both officers were still shedding virus, so it would take at least another week or two before they were allowed out of the restricted zone. They saw no other souls alive on the flight. Uhura put them down on the edge of a foggy rainforest, and under the canopy where they set up camp it was a blissful nine degrees cooler.

That night, under the few stars filtering down through the trees, their coordination had come back enough to kiss, to take off their filthy uniforms, and to feel everything with an intensity unmatched from _before,_ a scant week ago. McCoy didn't know whether they were doing this because they were both insanely grateful to be alive, because of the enforced intimacy, or because of the odd side effect of buzzing pleasure in their embattled nervous systems, as if every cell in their bodies was delighted to be alive too. He didn't care about motivations and neither did she, so overjoyed were they freely move and breath and bask in each others' touching.

"You know, our cardiac muscles might have been weakened. This goes against physician recommendation," he murmured, freeing her from the last vestiges of her underclothes and tasting her chest between her breasts.

"I'll go easy on you, doc," she countered, pushing him back and climbing on top.

Much later, when their cells and skin and muscles and breath had finally been satiated from the promised leisurely lovemaking, they drifted in and out. "I could get used to this," McCoy uttered softly to her, before he stopped to consider he was actually saying that out loud. He only meant that it had been ages since he had been comforted by contact with another person, all night every night, without fear of awkwardness or abandonment.

"It's a little complicated," she murmured back. "I can't guarantee anything for when we get back to Enterprise."

"That damned green-blooded goblin strikes again," McCoy said, but without heat. She laughed, a musical sound once again, and nuzzled his neck.

"We're going to be down here for awhile, and we _did_ save most of a planet. I prescribe a week of r-n-r for us, at a minimum."

"I concur with your diagnosis, Dr. Uhura," and this time they both laughed, and pulled each other close once again.

 

 

 


End file.
